Saturday, October 1, 2011

Costs in Medicine - additional evidence.

Yesterday, I said:

So on to a new round of hand wringing about medical costs. What is interesting to me is that what I read coming out of Washington seems to be addressing a system that I am not familiar with. I see all around me reasons that medical costs are high, but none of these are seriously addressed, some not even mentioned.Some years ago, I asked the outgoing President of the American College of Radiology (our large national organization that deals with legislation) what was the most surprising thing that he had learned in his tenure. His reply was immediate, no thought necessary: he was shocked at how little legislators knew about the things they write legislation on. And so it is.

Today, I see that at least some others are aware of the problem of inexperienced neophytes with political agendas running our health care:

The point is that ObamaCare was meticulously crafted by people who didn’t have a clue how health insurance worked or how people respond to the various economic incentives in health care and insurance. And we just got another example of my claim with the notice of the probable mothballing of the CLASS Act, yet another actuarially unsound provision in ObamaCare.
The ObamaCare effort was like those utopian planners who have a vision for how an economy should work, and then try to force everyone to conform to that vision.

I am not a fan of the insurance companies, but reality is that currently, they are an indisposable part of our health care. Perhaps the actual goal was to make the insurance companies insolvent. Who knows? The real point here is that the legislation that became the Affordable Healthcare Act was written by people who truly know little about what they are directing. The result is sadly predictable.